My two years in Craftsbury were amazing: great people, great place, and great experiences. Even though I’m excited about the adventures to come, I was sad to say goodbye. I’ll miss the people the most, of course. But I’ll also miss the view from Elinor’s kitchen windows, watching the morning mist rise off of the headwaters of the Black River. I’ll miss pre-dinner rows in the double with Chelsea. I’ll miss spring crust skiing on the corn fields off Sam’s. I’ll miss adventure runs around Mansfield and Jay. I’ll miss Pepa feeding us donuts and popsicles during OD rollerskis. There are a many more things I’ll miss, but we’ll leave it at that for now.

Here is a very random photographic retrospective (in no particular order) from the last two years:

Chelsea and I on a jaunt around Jay.

Quick Quiz: Who is this?

Mmmm...pizza.

Susan playing beanbag biathlon with the littlest skiers on Kids Day.

Magdalena Neuner fans came out in force (with their special jackets) for the Fort Kent World Cup.

Probably the most beautiful location for a dryland training camp: Tahoe.

The Craftsbury boys at the 2011 BKL Fest.

Spring skiing on Murphy's field.

Oh yeah, I'll miss the rope swing for sure!

Sunset over the stadium in Finland.

Thanksgiving dinner in West Yellowstone '09.

Very cold biathlon race in Jericho.

Last practice with the BKLers.

Anyways, what I’m really here for is to see the biathlon action. Here are some photos from the last couple days. I meant to take some during today’s pursuit but I got too excited cheering and watching the range carefully. Tomorrow’s mass start should be even more exciting!

That's me on the big screen during Wednesday's "TV Test Race." Check out the name they gave me...

Here you can see all the different angles from all the different cameras along the course. Even when we only forerun the cameras follow us along. It really makes you want to ski with good technique.

This guy, dressed up like a trapper, has been at all the events. He's carrying an Acadian flag and I noticed at least one French biathlete look at him funny, trying to figure out why he was carrying what looked to be a French flag.

A view of the range and part of the stadium. There are a TON of volunteers and here you can see the range workers marching out before the start.

This one's for Pepa. A Bulgarian athlete following a Swede into the stadium.

Sara Studebaker racing to 17th place (with clean shooting!)

Hannah in a skate sprint heat on the last day of Nationals. She ended up 10th!

Tim qualified 5th in the skate sprint at Nationals. Here he is leading a heat up the major climb on the course.

After the last race at Nationals Chelsea, Hannah, and I stayed in Maine for one extra day to volunteer at a Fast and Female event at Gould Academy in Bethel. Fast and Female is an organization that was started by Canadian Olympian Chandra Crawford with the goal of getting girls to stay involved with sports. (Check out Chelsea’s Fasterskier article about it here.) The whole day in Bethel was all about being active, having fun, and getting girls psyched about skiing. It was a great day!

Chelsea leading her group through one of the stations.

I led a "bean-bag biathlon" station. If you missed, you had to do push-ups.

Maybe I've been in Craftsbury too long, but I hadn't heard of zumba until this day. It was...interesting.

The whole crew. 130 + girls and 30 + instructors!

And finally, a shot I grabbed at yesterday’s UVM Carnival / NENSA Eastern Cup race at Trapp’s.

Ben Koons, Pat, and Matt coming into the finish.

Saturday was a sprint race, which in biathlon means two shooting stages and 7.5 km of skiing for the women. Susan won and Hannah came in 2nd!

Hannah racing on Saturday.

Susan only missed one target on Saturday but neither Hannah or I were particularly happy with our shooting. I went 3-3, meaning I missed 3 targets each in prone and standing. That’s pretty bad for me in prone. I went hard and felt good skiing, though. As I crossed the finish line and tried to catch my breath, Algis was standing there and John Madigan checked my bolt and waited patiently for my bib.

Bent over my poles, I asked Algis, “What happened to prone?” I knew he had been looking through the scope and I thought maybe I hadn’t taken the wind into account.

“What happened to prone? Let me tell you what happened to prone.” Algis is one of the nicest people I know but he couldn’t hide the frustration in his voice. “You didn’t do what you train! You slowed down, became cautious. Your range time was almost a minute. You tried too hard to hit the targets.”

“Was it the wind?” I asked, “I took a click.”

“No, it wasn’t the wind. Your misses were all over the place.” He patted me on the shoulder, releasing me to take off my bib and go get warm.

Whoops. A range time of a minute is a good 20 or more seconds longer than I have in training. After cooling down, changing my clothes, and getting something to eat I went back to chat again with Algis. He talked to me about needing to act with confidence on the range, being sure of every action. Slowing down because it’s a race and you’re afraid of messing up will guarantee that you do mess up.

And that, right there is the big reason I love biathlon. I love the fact – even though it can be agonizingly frustrating – that shooting is so mental and that the smallest of changes will be the difference between missing a target and hitting one. Perhaps it is because most of my personal athletic history was in gymnastics, a sport where the changes required to stay on the beam instead of landing in a heap on the mat are too small for most people to see. Shooting is pretty much exactly the same and I love that you have to pay such close attention to it.

Needless to say, Hannah and I were both looking forward to another chance to improve our shooting the next day. Sunday’s race was delayed by an hour to allow the temperatures to warm up to a balmy 0 degrees. Using overmitts and hand warmers, I managed to keep my trigger finger warm and I went into the range thinking “confidence. confidence. confidence.” Coming into the first prone stage I kept my normal cadence and only missed one! In the middle of my next ski lap Algis ran over to me and told me to take two clicks up, even though I had had four hits they must have been low. Back at the range again I took the correction, dropped into position, and fired off five rounds. Only one miss again, but this time it was the last one, guess I got a little too excited. Still, I was really happy with my prone shooting. (Standing was still rough, I definitely have a lot of work to do there…) Even more importantly than hitting targets, Algis told me later that I decreased my range time in prone by 20 seconds. So Sunday was a good race, and with no frost bite!

Sunday's race set a personal record for the most layers worn in a ski race.

Hannah skiing wicked fast on Sunday.

My Dad and I after Sunday's race. I actually was trying to smile here but my face was too frozen to make it happen.

Next we head to Lake Placid for one more weekend of NorAms.

There was some heavy fog on Saturday during the warm weather.

The fog was actually moving pretty quickly and the glimpses over to the mountains kept changing.

Rangeley is the third R. As you probably know by now, Rumford (and most of the rest of New England) are short on snow. We went up to Rangeley yesterday to ski since the trails were closed at Rumford while they work hard to get ready for the next race. The drive to Rangeley may be a bit bumpy but the views from the Height of Land are well worth putting up with it and the skiing there was great. Today we got to ski at Rumford and oh man, what a difference a day makes! Now that it’s finally cold enough to blow snow they’ve had all their snow guns going full-bore. There was a HUGE green dump truck getting filled with snow from the piles and moving it around to different parts of the course. We weren’t able to ski the whole thing today but we walked/ran it after our ski and I was really impressed with how much snow they’re moving around. There’s a ton of work going into it and I’m really looking forward to seeing the 2.5 km loop tomorrow. Here’s a photo from today that Nat Herz took…

Snow getting moved and the dedicated shovelers moving it.

Today was sunnier than it has been, with no mist.

Actually an old fire station? Or just the sign?

Stay tuned for reports from the next three races! And many thanks to the parents and friends who are coming to cheer us on (and bring delicious food)!

View of the jumps and bridge from the stadium. This photo was taken at almost exactly noon.

The 90 m ski jump at night.

A couple days ago Judy did lots of research regarding local cuisine and then she and Dick took us grocery shopping for an evening feast. Pouring over all of the options at the grocery store and trying to decipher the packages was really fun. And everything was delicious! Chelsea made a quark-based cloudberry cheese cake for dessert. Mmmm….

Clockwise from top: Rye bread, potato flat breat, three different types of cheese (including "squeeky" cheese), and lignon berries.

Three types of pickled herring. Sinappi (or mustard for you anglophones) in the center, dill on the right, I'm not sure what the one on the left was.

A whole smoked salmon!

Wild reindeer sauteed with wild mushrooms, salad (the lettuce actually comes as a whole plant in a little pot), Hannah's homemade rye bread, roasted root veggies.

Chandra Crawford (CAN) leading a heat in today's sprint race. Both Hannah and Pat made the heats today and it was really fun to watch them! One more race tomorrow, 5/10 km classic.

Today marked the end of our weekend of racing with a 10 km skate. The weather was definitely cooler but the snow was still fast and as I crested the top of the big climb on my first lap I caught a glimpse of sunlight hitting the windmills. (That was sometime around 11 am.) Sunlight here is always a reason to celebrate. Ida didn’t race today, so she was out there cheering us on as we made our way up that hill two times. In any race, but particularly one where you are feeling tired, there isn’t anything better than hearing a friendly voice yelling and cheering for you. Ida is wicked good at saying just the right things to get you to pick up your pace a bit and ski a little better. Thanks Ida!! A number of us also got cheered on by Justyna Kowalczyck as we raced by her while she was doing a cool down. Another excellent motivator. I was feeling really tired today but it was still satisfying to go hard. After a ski in the morning tomorrow we will head south (it’s all relative) to Rovaniemi for our last week in Finland and two more races!

Anyways, the story I want to share is from my fourth time shooting. We were doing max classic intervals, four times about 3 minutes long, and perfect for a shooting session. Hans and I definitely didn’t have room to pack a scope in our luggage, so we have been using a sort of public scope that lives in the range house here. This means we share it with other teams that didn’t bring a scope and the morning of our intervals we were sharing with some Belarusians. As I went back to look at my shots through the scope the coach said, “If you trust me, I will help you zero.” Sounded like a great offer to me and I said sure.

“Take ten clicks to the left and five to the right.” My first reaction was to say “ok!” because that’s just what you say when a coach tells you what to do. But on second thought I became very confused. Ten to the left and five to the right? Why wouldn’t I just take five to the left? Maybe he messed up his English and said right but meant up or down. I paused. And then asked him what I had to do, again.

“Ten to the left and five to the right.”

I started to question him, “Umm…but isn’t that just…”

“Yes, yes, just do as I say. Your sight isn’t moving.”

So I did what he told me to do and, of course, it worked! I had no idea that sights could kind of get stuck and not move, so if you over compensate the clicks a little it can get them back on track. I shot a few more clips to confirm and the friendly Belarusian coach told me a few times, “This is great shooting! Very good groups.” That bolstered my confidence a bit and I went on to do the intervals feeling very good about my shooting.

Basically that little story sums up one of the big reasons I love skiing. In general, everyone is super friendly and willing to help others out. Okay, I know that’s wicked cheesy but it’s true.

I still don’t have any photos from the range, so I will leave you instead with a few of the giant swans that live in the river by our cabins.

Appropriately named, these are Tundra Swans.

Hannah and I ran around to get some photos of these guys but they hopped in the current and really took off.

Stay tuned! I’m sure we’ll have some good stories from the race tomorrow!

After a long couple days of travel we are now settled in our home for the next three weeks: Muonio, Finland. The flights over were pretty uneventful, except that our plane to Paris was remarkably empty so we were all able to stretch out and sleep a bit during the flight. As our final flight descended into Rovaniemi we caught glimpses of a dusting of snow below and an excellent view of a brilliant pink sunset. That may have been our last flight of the journey to Finland but it was not the end of our travels, as we still had a 3 hour drive to Muonio.

The view from our cabin.

The drive from Rovaniemi to Muonio really deserves its own paragraph. Try to picture this: eight skiers plus one Pepa and all of the accompanying ski bags and luggage attempting to squeeze into a nine-seater van. We wanted to strap the ski bags to the top of the van but it only opened on one side (and there was no rack) so there was no way to string the straps through the doors. Instead we piled the ski bags down the center aisle of the van and the duffel bags on top and around – basically wherever they could fit. Chelsea and Hannah had to assume their seats in the back before the van was totally packed because we had to stuff the bags around them. (They definitely drew the short end of the stick on that one.) Three of the seats were facing backwards and the ski bags ran right up to the middle seat in that row. I was sitting there which meant that I had to either straddle the ski bags or stand on the seat while leaning over to avoid hitting the ceiling of the van. For the next three hours I alternated between these two positions, which understandably probably drove Pat and Ollie nuts, but it was the only way I could figure out to prevent my legs from going numb. All in all it was a pretty interesting drive. However uncomfortable we may have been it was exciting to be driving north and seeing snow. And it felt so good to finally get to our cabins beside the river in Muonio!

Our first time on snow was during a skate ski on Wednesday morning. There is some natural snow but what we are skiing on right now is mostly snow saved from last year (mounded into a big pile and preserved under sawdust) and man-made snow. The skiing is great! About 4 km of trails are open at the moment but they hope to double that by this weekend. A big biathlon range with 41 points is located right in the middle of it all and I’m looking forward to getting some shooting in. Though I have to admit that seeing the entire Swedish National Biathlon Team training this morning was really intimidating. This morning we had the pleasant surprise of waking up to a few inches of new snow for our classic ski. Technique has been the big focus so far, making sure we start off the season with good, efficient skiing. This is the time to make changes and today Pepa was out with her video camera, watching carefully as always. The trails are packed with athletes from all over: Sweden, Norway, Russia, Belarus, Switzerland, Estonia, and Ukraine. It’s awesome to see so many great skiers in one place, although I think if I tried to ski behind one of the Russian women going “easy” I would be somewhere north of my threshold pace. They. Are. Fast.

Chelsea during the sewing party, putting our new patches on our new gear.

Hans, Chelsea and I had a chance to explore the town during our afternoon run yesterday. We successfully located the library and the thrift store, so we’re hoping to go back and visit them again soon!

Grocery shopping: an important part of any training camp.